Blog

One thing I love about blogging is the amount of support that pours across the wires to me when I'm having a bad day. I'm a little insecure and you all are like, "we're going to come over and smack you upside your head if you keep saying bad things about yourself!" and then I feel better. A lot better. I'm not sure what could induce me to come down off this roller coaster, though. I'm used to it. It's my home.

But, I did come up with a new motto for life on the roller coaster. Are you ready? It's "Give it a year." It works like this:

"I'm totally depressed about how this book is coming along. I think my dialogue is stilted and it sounds like I'm in the second grade."

Give it a year.

"I am the worst dancer in my class. I look like a geranium with epilepsy."

Give it a year.

"I'm trying to be more organized, but my house still looks like my housekeeper is a potato. Where is my wallet? I can't find my keys."

Give it a year.

And what it means is to keep trying and not even think about quitting for a year. Wake up and write, go to dance class every week, try to organize. Because I am an insta-quitter. You're probably going to hear about all of this until you're sick of it, but I'm trying to tie myself into getting over certain aspects of my personality that have kept me from doing things I want to do for a long time.

Anyways. I discovered something over the last dark, snow covered, powerless week: I love electricity! I LOVE IT. What? The power was only out for about 28 hours? Well, it felt like a week. Especially when I couldn't post anything. Especially when, during one long, power-lacking night, the kids woke up three times shrieking their little hearts out because the candle had gone out in their rooms. My two older kids have complete darkness in the "top three most terrifying things that could ever possibly happen" list that they carry around with them. The way they scream, you'd think that they woke up falling out of a tree, rather than just in a lack of light, and if there was ever a heart attack waiting to happen, it's being awakened this way, three times in one night, by ear splitting screams.

But, yes, I love power. I love lights, I love my computer, I love music, I love refrigerators. I'd make a lousy pioneer, although there are times when I willingly leave my world of light and microchips to go into the woods and sleep in a tent and cook over a fire. But it's one thing to sit around a fire in the dirt, drinking chai and singing along with my superstar husbnad with the guitar, all without power; it's another to sit in my house staring at the fridge, willing it to start working so that I don't have to throw my milk out.

On another note, the snow falling yesterday morning was very, very pretty. Like pieces of ash, huge and light and drifting over moss and trees. Our woodstove bravely fought the cold, and we sat inside watching with wide eyes as our rare, once yearly, snowfall made a light dusting over the forest, at least until the sun won out and it all went away. We are blessed.